Hazardous waste has been injected in to the soil, bodies of water, and air all across the United States since the Industrial Revolution. This led to the establishment of a national Superfund in 1980, which is a government funded program that had attempted to clean up these polluted sites. Now the fund which has spent nearly $1 billion a year on clean up is practically bankrupt after cleaning up only 886 sites since its beginning, leaving 1,203 in need of restoration. The fund was originally created with placing blame on the polluter often resulting in forcing that party to pay for the clean up. This still left “orphan sites”, or sites in which the owner abandoned it or went bankrupt and excise taxes on oil and chemical industries and some income tax were left to support their clean up. But the fees expired in 1995 and Congress has not renewed them causing the tax on individuals to be increased significantly. Many Senators are lobbying for the taxes on oil and chemical industries to be reinstated although this ignores the original meaning of the fund, to charge those responsible.